Backup and restore systems are commonly used to make archive copies of data so that the data may be recovered in event of a catastrophic or partial loss of data. In many cases, a backup system may backup data without being able to understand or parse the data. For example, an application may have a database that may be stored in a single file or series of files. A backup application may be capable of making a copy of the files associated with the database, but may not be able to retrieve a single record from the database.
In many cases, a database may be very large. When a single piece of data is desired from a backup database, a common method may be to restore the entire database and allow an application that created the database to access the database to restore the data. In many cases, the application may not operate on network resources, but may only operate on local resources. In such cases, the entire database, which may be terabytes in size, may be transferred from the backup system to the local system so that the application may access the database.